Time was you’d be happy, as a West End or Broadway producer, with swapping shows between the two theatrical capitals of London and New York, and licensing productions in other English-speaking territories like Australia or South Africa (though in the apartheid-era in which I grew up in Johannesburg in the 70s, of course, a cultural embargo was in place that prevented many hits from travelling there, so we were dependent on classics outside its reach). The biggest Broadway hits may have had a pre and/or post-Broadway life, as would some shows from the West End with regard to the UK regions. But that was the end of the road, in every sense.
But then came Cats, and a new brand of theatrical globalisation that saw the show “shipped out” to other non-English speaking territories around the world, but in identical recreations of the original physical production. This producing model, pioneered by Cameron Mackintosh and meticulously maintained by him from a quality point of view to ensure that the integrity of the product always remained intact, would be followed by the international successes of Les Miserables, The Phantom of the Opera and Miss Saigon, a quartet of shows that put British theatre amongst the biggest exports of the 80s.
But Mackintosh hasn’t had too many big original successes since those heady days (and neither, for that matter, has Andrew Lloyd Webber). So the future of the British musical as a global property was stalled, until the arrival of Mamma Mia! at the end of the 90s (produced not by Mackintosh and/or Lloyd Webber but by Judy Craymer). And in the absence of being able to create original work, Mackintosh has now pioneered a radical plan to find yet more new life for his past hits, in a unique partnership that was formally announced yesterday that sees him joining forces with the leading Chinese performing arts agency China Arts and Entertainment Group to bring Western musicals to China for the first time, kicking off with Les Mis that will open the new National Grand Theater beside Tiananmen Square in Beijing in November 2008, to be followed by Mamma Mia!(both of them previously seen only in English language versions there) in 2009, but now both to be performed in Chinese language versions for the first time.
A new and potentially extremely lucrative new market is thereby being opened up, and though the projected production slate is inevitably top-heavy with Mackintosh’s own shows, it is interesting to see that the offerings for potential future new productions stretch to both Mamma Mia! and The Lion King. The world already can’t seem to get enough of these shows; but it will be interesting to see how this experiment in giving the Chinese a new cross-cultural experience will pay off.
